Re: gdate question.

[Havoc Pennington <rhpennin midway uchicago edu>]

On Wed, 2 Dec 1998, Sebastian Wilhelmi wrote:
> 
> Why are you using the MDY order for the API. This might be the natural

I'll change it, but to answer the question: I consider this a case of
inevitable cultural bias. MDY order has several perfectly reasonable
rationales: month is generally more important than the day of the month,
since it tells you the season etc. (how often do you not know the date,
vs. not know the month?), occasionally you use MY only (DY is never used),
etc. Mathematical significance is only one possible rationale, we could
also talk about cultural and daily significance (and the complete
mathematical irrationality of dates supports this). So IMO the decision is
totally arbitrary, and I just picked the one I was least likely to screw
up while writing the code. :-)

The code itself does not depend on the order, (i.e. parsing and output
will be locale-adjusted).

Anyway, I guess it is good manners to go with the international standard
rather than the US thing, so I'll make the change.

Jeff: it's irrelevant for sorting, we're just talking about the order 
you give arguments to g_date_set_mdy(). You'd either sort with your own
routines in the order of your choice, or with g_date_compare which is
agnostic on order.

Havoc